Having already installed gatsby-cli, One could run: gatsby new mySite https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby-starter-blog
…in the terminal instead of a git clone of the
gatsby-starter-blog repo
like I did, which then needs to be followed by a yarn or npm i before
running gatsby develop for the first time. The
Gatsby Docs start with the gatsby new
command which takes care of this initial package install. (For more on git
and cloning, see git-clone docs.)
The source of the gatsby new command is split between create-cli.js and init-starter.js in the Gatsby repo.